[http://mattvenn.net Matt] put this picture of the next round of Piezo Preamp boards up on his [http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewvenn/7142271029/in/photostream/ Flickr Stream]. I've removed the piezo -ve input, and tied it to ground, which might loose 3dB of gain, but makes figuring out ground planes a lot easier. I couldn't hear the difference when I shorted piezo -ve to ground, and it makes the layout much smaller and easier. We're down to about 50% of the original size now.

We had a great opening for [http://www.mo-seph.com/projects/thawingcolours Thawing Colours] at the [http://www.ed.ac.uk/about/museums-galleries/talbot-rice Talbot Rice] gallery. Lots of people came, and nothing broke. See full post for a selection of images and video from the opening:

Got the first set of boards from [http://mattvenn.net Matt Venn] for prototyping piezo preamps, and they're great! I've soldered both boards, after using the JFET matching described [http://www.nrgrecording.de/html/fetmachting.html here] (NOTE: link seems to be dead - I'll copy the circuit diagram from my notebook).

In the [http://www.mo-seph.com/blog/datavis1 last post], talking about my work with Andreas and [http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/geosciences/people?indv=1578&cw_xml=person.html Marc], we saw how a bit of data visualisation helped to understand why some output was looking funny, and how the choice of classifier contributed to some strange behaviour. In that case, we were really lucky to spot it.

Just got a bluetooth enabled drawing robot working. It's based on Sandy Noble's [http://code.google.com/p/polargraph/wiki/Introduction Polargraph] and code+circuits from [http://www.mattvenn.net Matt Venn]. It uses a pair of stepper motors to wind a pen carrying gondola across a sheet of paper.

This is my first attempt at making laser cut chocolate moulds. I started with some big simple shapes and thick acrylic (5mm), and with lots of helps from [http://stuartchilds.com/ Stuart Childs] ([http://jamjarcollective.com/ Jam Jar Collective!]), made a set of modular sheets, which form up to make larger moulds.